Saturday, January 7, 2012

Cooking with Ferran Adria

One of my gifts from the Ho Ho Ho season was a copy of Ferran Adria's The Family Meal, Homecooking cookbook.

There are 31 set menus, as in the Spanish menu, well the French too, two courses and a dessert plus wine, water and bread. Sometimes coffee.

LOTS of photos, and he lays out a timeline for you so that you can have it all ready at the right time. As we got back yesterday to a fairly empty and chilly house (about 12 degrees inside), we had to go shopping today, so we checked out the ingredients for menu #1. Cesar salad, hamburger with potato chips and a coca de Santiago. We've got an ABBA sound track going, and the cake in the oven.

Once the food was ready we were too excited to wait for pictures, so this is all there is:

Our caesar dressing, comes thick it does....stir sloooowwly in one direction only, while trickling in the oil......also, when the local egg yolks are orange, the dressing comes out rather less white.

Burgers before cooking:

Coca de Santiago, that came out rather thinner than intended, but still very good:

The coca de Sanitago is a recipe that dates from the 16th century and uses ground almonds in lieu of flour - can you say arabic influence on the cuisine? At the store we couldn't find ground almonds, only chopped, so we pounded them in the mortar and pestle, and pounded and pounded and pounded. True renaissance style cooking. Then we had to beat the eggs and sugar together (with an electric mixer) for five min. till thick and foamy. The two of us with a fork and super powerful arms beat it for about 15 and decided that was done, risen or not. Again renaissance style cooking......without the serfs.

We are making our own croutons too.......baked rather than deep fried.

When I went to the butcher's for the ground meat, I was given a lengthy dissertation on why I could not buy beef, only veal....had to do with Mad Cow disease.....an either Spain wide, EU wide, or Catalan regulation/advisory is that you don't eat any cow that is more than 2 months old.

I personally have never heard of this before, and didn't want to mention the amount of beef I have eaten since that LONG ago break out......

Anyway, it was all good, though we only need 1 burger per person and we forgot to put the chips out on the plates. That's OK, we can enjoy them another time.

5 comments:

Another little gift that the UK has given the world. That is why we never win Eurovision because everyone hates us. To be honest we can buy minced beef here and I don't think any country is as locked down as the UK. You should ask your sister as I am sure she is more aware of the state of EU regulations regarding beef than most

I know elP, and another store nearer home sells me beef here in the same village. Whatever...

Boo and Trev, ok, sounds a little bit over the top, I am not at all sure that everyone hates you...I have never heard any anti-British sentiment here...some mystification at the wearing of summer dresses when the locals think it's cold ie 23 degrees but hate? I have beef here at other times and in other places, it is not a common type of food here, they are normally pork eaters anyway, but regulations? Sounds weird to me.

The latest

Who???

A Canadian sailor aground in Catalonia, Spain. We used to live in Toronto, then we got on our boat and sailed down to the Bahamas where we spent most of our time for three years and now we are here in Spain, outside of Barcelona, learning the languages, eating and doing our thing.
Yup, we still miss the boat but life is good.